Pay-for-Performance Contracts in the Lab and the Real World: Evidence from Nigeria

Sebastian Bauhoff and Eeshani Kandpal

No 677, Working Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: A two-stage experiment disentangles the effect of various aspects of pay-for-performance contracts. The first is a lab-in-the-field experiment where 1,359 health workers are primed with a checklist of salient clinical tasks, then randomized within 690 clinics to receive no incentives, rewards, or penalties for treating hypothetical patients. Both rewards and penalties improve performance by 20 percent and generate spillovers on unincentivized tasks, but small incentives capture most gains. In the second stage, lab impacts translate into the real world: lab PFP exposure improves by 20 percent the care provided to real-world patients even after the lab experiment.

Keywords: Pay-for-performance; Health workers; Lab-in-the-field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 I11 I15 J41 J45 M52 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 82 pages
Date: 2024-01-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hea, nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cgdev.org/publication/pay-performance- ... l&utm_campaign=repec

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:wpaper:677

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Center for Global Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publications Manager ().